Once upon a typo
This famous book about media was named by a mistake.
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan and designer Quentin Fiore sent a small black-and-white paperback to press. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message. It came back The Medium is the Massage.
The story goes that McLuhan saw the proof and told them to leave it. The typo was truer than the title. Media don't hand you ideas to weigh. They work you over. Knead, press, shape. Hands on your attention so constant you stopped noticing them years ago.
Persistent or pervasive?
“All media work us over completely.”
Marshall McLuhan,
The Medium is the Massage (1967)
Sixty years later
The tools we communicate with don't just carry our ideas from one head to another. They rewire everything: how we think, what we feel, the way we behave.
McLuhan watched television do it.
We watch the algorithm: platforms deciding what a billion people see before breakfast, feeds tuning themselves to the twitch of a thumb. And now AI, a medium that doesn't just deliver the message. It writes it, times it, and rewrites it for the next person, using whatever worked on you.
Now the massage
has automation.
There used to be a line between the message and the medium: the ad lived in the paper, the spot played between the songs, and everyone could tell which part was selling. That black-and-white line is now almost entirely gone. But no matter what you use to influence the world, be it pen and paper, the printing press, or digital frequencies:
Everything is messaging.